The First Angry Man

Join us for a screening and conversation with the film's director Jason Cohn and Lafayette's own Laney Whitcanack, moderated by Ariella Markowitz, KQED documentary producer.

The First Angry Man looks at Howard Jarvis, whose 1978 ballot initiative, Proposition 13, changed everything in California and beyond. The film unpacks the dramatic campaign, its quirky characters and its enduring consequences, exploring how the great public ambitions of postwar America collapsed into Reagan era parsimony and the permanent tax revolt.

Featuring lively archival footage and interviews with first-hand witnesses to the events, including Governor Gray Davis, Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz and anti-tax firebrand Grover Norquist, The First Angry Man puts a bracket around the last four decades of American political life, inviting viewers to see our era as an anomaly in American history, at odds with some of our nation’s deepest underpinnings.
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Jason Andrew Cohn is the award-winning director, producer and writer of numerous documentaries, including The First Angry Man, which was a finalist for the Library of Congress Lavin/Ken Burns Prize for Film and EAMES: The Architect and the Painter, which won a George Foster Peabody Award. He co-produced Arwen Curry’s recent American Masters documentary, Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin.

Ariella Markowitz is a documentary producer with KQED, currently producing "The Speaker," about how Nancy Pelosi changed the face of power in America. She has worked on podcasts with Michael Lewis ("Against the Rules") and Apple ("Time to Walk") for Pushkin Industries. For The Lever, she produced the weekly news podcast "Lever Time" and the series "Tax Revolt", about the unlikely revolution that hijacked American politics.

Laney Whitcanack is a Lafayette Library and Learning Center Foundation Trustee and Chair of the successful 2026 Yes on Measure H campaign in support of Lafayette schools. She is for former CEO of Coro, Northern California.

This screening is organized in collaboration with the Renegade Humanities Collective.
The Renegade Humanities Collective exists to defend and strengthen community-based humanities programming and promotes opportunities for people to engage in shared learning and dialogue. The collective is made up of independent filmmakers and filmgoers, librarians and library patrons, museum professionals and museum goers, teachers and students, and others who care deeply about the future of the humanities in California and beyond. Find them @renegadehumanities.

This program is made possible in part thanks to our Program Sponsor Orchard Nursery.

First Angry Man, Documentary Film

Lafayette Library and Learning Center Foundation